Pictured here is a hand-painted Top
Toys Yoda (El Maestro Jedi) hardcopy.
Painted hardcopies like this one, known as paint masters, would have been used
for a variety of purposes including photography, samples for trade shows like
Toy Fair, or examples of color scheme for foreign vendors. This particular one
was created in-house at Top Toys and probably used to test the color
matching capabilties for this particular figure to match the US and other foreign
licensed paint decos.

If you look at the photo you can see that this foreign hardcopy is held together
by metal pins as most domestic harcopies would have been, though these pins
are a bit thicker than the style used domestically.

This image is a side by side comparison of the hardcopy (left) next to a production
figure (right).

The next image is of the prototype (left) and production (right) cloaks.

Next we have both of Yodas sporting thier Jedi robes.

Because of the way this hardcopy was created it is slightly smaller than a
Kenner production figure. Top Toys basically used Kenner
production figures as the sculpt stage in creating a hardcopy. As a result of
this the Top Toys figures are a bit smaller than their Kenner
counterparts. Due to cost, Top Toys chose to make their own molds for
their star Wars figures, rather than pay Kenner for molds. Top
Toys was a company already manufacturing toys, so they had molding capabilities.
For a while there was much speculation as to why Top Toys would even
have to create thier own hardcopies but the answer is quite simple really. When
a production mold is cut a machine called a pantograph traces the contours of
a hardcopy and cuts the mold. A production figure would have been much too soft
for the stylus to work, thus a hardcopy would have had to have been made for
tooling purposes. An example of this method being used domestically would be
the hardcopies cast from production figures to create the TRU Classic 4 pack
in the mid 1990's.

Like all hardcopies the figure lacks both foot holes and copyrights. An interesting
aspect of Top Toys figures is that the production figures also lack
these details.

The final image is a group shot of what Nathan has assembled so far. Included
in the image are a production Top ToysYoda
on the left, and a Top Toys carded sample on the right. In front of
that are the cane
mold, loose production figure, and a complete Top Toys painted
hardcopy.

The Yoda figure is one of the harder to get Top Toys figures so it's
a treat to see a prototype of this rare figure.